Making movies
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The thing that matters least in your writing is what you say about yourself.
Now you might be saying: “hey wait a second….what I have to say about myself or my business is really important to my audience.”
I get it. It’s tempting to think your reader really wants to know more about you and about what you want, and that satisfying that expectation is what makes that reader come back for more.
You might point to fiction and personal stuff, and say it’s fashionable these days to be confessional in your writing or to put your private struggles out there for others. And in business, it’s Marketing 101 to find differentiators about your company relative to the competition and make that your core message.
Again, I get it.
Be personal. Be authentic. Tell stories.
All of this is great advice. And on the surface, I don’t dispute it.
But you owe it to yourself to ask why you think your reader needs to read more about you.
Don’t just accept at face value that they do simply because people like a good story.
The world is overflowing with good stories. And the true scarcity in our marketplace today is audience attention for even the very best of these.
See how you have your work cut out for you, |NAME|?
If you want to earn that attention, understand what’s really motivating people to choose to take time to listen to what you have to say.
The reason why people want to read about you is because they’re hoping to find themselves in something you say. If you succeed, they will be back.
A Movie of You.
No matter what your story is—your website, your book, your personal blog, or even your social media posts—you’re directing what amounts to a Movie of You.
It has a hero, maybe there’s a supporting cast, there’s usually adversity, and there’s some kind of resolution to a problem.
But it’s only worth paying attention to if the audience can learn something from it.
Storytelling masters and kings of comedy have this in common.
Look at Rule #2 (http://thinkitcreative.com/blog/pixar-rules-of-storytelling/) in Pixar’s list of rules of storytelling:
”Keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.”
Even for a Movie of You, you need to make it the Story About Them.
Good comedians have this figured out, too.
Louis CK gets up on stage and tells you a funny story that you think is giving you some kind of great insight (or lurid detail) into his personal life. You think you’re laughing at his humiliating recount of that time he went out on a date.
But what’s really happening is he’s building all kinds of those windows and doors for you to open and peer into so that you’ll see a bit of yourself in the joke.
It’s not about him: it’s about you. Empathy sells the audience. Only then can you be persuasive and convince them to read more, to care more, to give a damn, to take the next step.
Jeff Goodby, creative director of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners calls this “alarming intimacy.”
I sure like that expression. It’s engaged, he says, when you’ve managed with words to achieve that alarming feeling that someone thinks the way you do.
Try this simple trick.
The next time you’re working on webcopy or even a business letter, have a look at how you’ve opened the conversation.
Did you start by talking about what “we” at this company do or why “we” have enduring principles. Now read further. See where you’ve included much further down some benefits that readers can gain by using your product or idea? It’s there, go look again. Now take those benefits and put them ahead of those “we” focused statements.
What you are doing is making it easier for the reader to see what’s in it for them to keep reading. It says “I see you.”
And that’s something all readers want to feel.
Very best, Patrick
A special P.S.
Earlier this week, I lost someone very dear to me to ALS. This is a cruel disease, made even worse by the fact that it’s historically not been an incurable disease, just an underfunded (http://als-advocacy.blogspot.ca/2009/04/als-is-not-incurable-disease-it-is.html) one.
Consider donating to your local ALS chapter or take the Ice Bucket Challenge. Know that every dollar you give helps research to move forward, and gives hope to the families who are caring for a loved one who has this terrible disease.
Donate in Canada at http://www.als.ca/en/donate/ Donate in the US at http://www.alsa.org/donate/
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